Chimera states are manifested through the coexistence of synchronous and asynchronous dynamics and have been observed in various systems. To analyze the role of network topology in giving rise to chimera states we study a heterogeneous network model comprising two group of nodes, of high and low degrees of connectivity. The architecture facilitates the analysis of the system, which separates into a densely-connected coherent group of nodes, perturbed by their sparsely-connected drifting neighbors. It describes a synchronous behavior of the densely-connected group and scaling properties of the induced perturbations.